Sunrise
by piaffe417
Summary: "We can only appreciate the miracle of a sunrise if we have waited in the darkness." (Anonymous) He used to be an early riser. She never liked to get out of bed in the morning. Then one day they woke up together.
1. Chapter 1

A/N – The pieces of this story have been sitting on my computer for a year(ish) and I was only able to finish over the holidays. I have long adored not only Bennet and Rose, but the way they're written to be so alike and yet simultaneously different. Hence, this two-sided piece that examines how they view mornings. (Point of order: This piece was written by a decidedly anti-morning person. I'll get up; just don't talk to me or expect me to talk to you.)

Spoilers for every episode through the end of the third series; I haven't seen four yet so if anything is inaccurate based on the new episodes, that's why. (And no spoilers for me if you comment – I mean it!) I don't own these people; I don't keep a lawyer on retainer; and the only things I have of value are two horses that cost too much to keep, so you wouldn't want them anyway. Comments go below if you're so inclined. Cheers!

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" **We can only appreciate the miracle of a sunrise if we have waited in the darkness."** _ **Anonymous**_

He used to be an early riser.

Even as a boy, Bennet Drake was up and out of bed as soon as he could untangle himself from the singled ragged blanket that served as covering to the skinny boy who resided in the rookery – a place that housed a myriad of other scrawny, bedraggled boys and their overworked, underpaid parents and siblings. In fact, there was barely a delay between his feet hitting the floor and his departure, for there was never breakfast of any kind to be found in the Drake family cupboards and he slept wearing the only set of clothes that he owned. What incentive, then, to linger?

Moreover, to rise quickly and hit the street alongside the rowdy gang he ran with was to find the possibility of a meal (usually procured illegally) and avoid the drunken blows of a father who'd spent yet another night in a public house or back alley and sad eyes of a mother who would bear the brunt of them in Bennet's stead.

To lie in bed past sunrise, then, was to put himself in harm's way and young Bennet learned early to avoid it at all costs.

Later, when he joined the army and found himself in the depths of the hellish furnace called Egypt, his boyhood lessons still rang true. There, to rise early (often before dawn had even contemplated cracking the horizon) was to achieve the best chance of seeing the sun set at the end of the same day. In point of fact, few men of Colonel Faulkner's regiment needed reveille to wake them at all – if indeed sleep found them in the first place, so on edge were they after their first glimpse of the dervishes they were sent to fight in the sand.

Most mornings, well before the first fingers of sunlight broke through the frigid cold of the desert night and boiled them alive all over again, Bennet and his compatriots rose swiftly and silently in the gray woolen darkness, kicked bedrolls aside with haste and reached for their weapons in the selfsame motion with which they pulled their broken and exhausted bodies up onto tired and blistered feet.

Of course, sometimes the enemy surprised them just after sunset, descending from within the blackness of the overnight hours - a vicious horde who used surprise to their advantage. Quickly Bennet learned that the human capacity to rise and fight in a single action was deeply engrained, something primitive that lived inside his very bones. Sometimes the war cry ripped from his chest before his eyes were even fully open. The fighting was raw, animalistic, and made the scraps he and his mates got into – indeed, even sought - during their Whitechapel boyhood look tame by comparison.

To rise late in the desert was to assume the risk of nevermore rising again, Army Sergeant Bennet Drake learned, and so he was always the first to his feet each morning, no matter how early it arrived.

After the events at El Teb and his years of regimented service to Queen and country, it was no great stretch of the imagination to understand why Whitechapel policeman Bennet Drake would likewise eschew sleeping past sunrise. Even on the very rare occasions when the nightmares of the desert left him unmolested, he still found that he retained his habit of rising quickly and making his way out the door just as the gas lamps flickered out in the street and daylight first filtered between the buildings.

The only real difference in his London mornings as an adult, it turned out, was the uniform he donned. No more frayed short pants or sand-stained military breeches; now it was a suit and tie and Bennet always took a moment to trim his beard and neaten his Spartan flat before making his way to the stationhouse on Leman Street. Always there was regimented purpose in his routine and never was there a desire to linger at home, no matter how devastating his day's work might be.

Even when the Ripper began his reign of fear in Whitechapel Bennet rose early. In fact, there was little time to do else but look for the fiend and pray his capture came in time to save the next victim. Hardly time to eat or drink or hatch a thought that wasn't related to how they might find and apprehend the Ripper during those dark days, and while Inspector Reid often collapsed onto a folding cot in his office rather than trek home, Bennet would simply locate an empty holding cell or unused chair in a back hallway and doze until Don Artherton delivered a nudge to his outstretched foot (a tentative nudge it was, and delivered with his own toe from a distance of a foot or so, for Bennet's military reflexes remained firmly and famously intact) and followed it with a cup of the thick Turkish mud he claimed was coffee.

Still later than that, when Bennet Drake shared his life with Bella – that too brief time that now is but a shadow of memory - he was up with the sun and moved about the flat as quietly as possible, trying not to wake his slumbering wife. She always looked so peaceful in the pre-dawn hours that it seemed criminal to disturb her and his immediate sense of purpose fell to brewing a pot of coffee so that they could share breakfast before he turned his thoughts toward Leman Street and the work of his day.

And then he blinked and Bella was gone, swallowed into the evils that lurked in the depths of Whitechapel – the depths that Bennet and the Inspector struggled against so valiantly, but to no avail. During the dark days that followed, there was oblivion, but no sleep, exhaustion but no reprieve. Day and night blended into one long slog that he was desperate to end – so desperate, in fact, that he didn't care what the eventual outcome was. Death was acceptable if only it pulled him from the purgatory in which he dwelled.

Manchester's streets offered healing, but even for newly-minted Constable Drake the morning routine was that of the Sergeant Drake of old: sunrise, out of bed, out the door. Bennet followed his habits or else they followed him; they were so firmly ingrained it was difficult to know.

Then came the morning he awakened back in a bed in London, only to discover that the sun was fully over the horizon; dawn had come and gone; and he had missed it.

This revelation should have been a shock. That the sun was at work and he was not should have infused a bolt of confused adrenaline into every drop of Bennet's blood, but on that fateful day it did not. On that day - and on the many that followed - he awakened with a pressing desire never to move again.

After all, why should a man wish to stir when he awoke with the head of Rose Erskine pillowed softly atop his chest?

Every morning prior to that one had served a singular purpose – the drive to go out, to seek something, _anything_ , whether it be food, or knowledge, or to fulfill a duty, to eke out survival, to discern answers to questions, to seek love or peace or even something he couldn't quite put a name to. Every new day presented a mission that Bennet Drake rose to meet as early as possible so as not to waste a moment of it.

But on the morning he awakened with Rose by his side – that first blissful, golden morning when the sun warmed his face before he woke – Bennet Drake felt the purposeful pull no longer. Was it possible that he was, for a brief and sun-washed moment, _content_? Was it possible that somewhere between the dark of yesterday and the light of this new morning he discovered the sense of peace that had eluded him for so very long?

The first time he saw Rose - the day he saved her life for the first (but not last) time –she purchased a piece of his soul. Call it kismet or propose a preordination by an unknown higher power; whatever it was, their bond was palpable, immutable, and real. It could not be vanquished by the trials life threw before them, nor could it be extinguished by their own careless words or the persistent passage of time.

"If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life," goes a line in one of Oscar Wilde's newest plays and, for his part, Bennet Drake always assumed that his path and that of Rose would follow different trajectories, never to intersect. He might wait in one place and she in another, but never would they converge except to pass by on the road of their singular journeys. His wait would be perpetual.

And then one night they collided, an impact of such force that the recent Whitechapel train crash paled by comparison. Still, in the back of Bennet's mind was the fear that, should they move but a fraction of an inch on the following morning, their lives would diverge once more and he would lose her forever.

But he forgot that it was Rose with whom he was entangled – Rose who purposely shifted her path into alignment with his; Rose of the indomitable will; Rose who refused to merely survive, but was determined to _thrive_. She hacked a trail into the wilderness of Whitechapel and suffered no fools along the way. When she told Bennet that something existed in Whitechapel that could never be broken, when she referenced the immutability of their relationship, he believed her. Rose would not allow the world to come between them now; it would have her to reckon with if it meddled and woe to the world if it should dare.

On that first morning - and the mornings that followed - Bennet Drake kissed the forehead, the cheek, the lips of the woman curled into him and did not rise. In the cocoon they created, they were safe from harm, from the opinions and actions of others, and from the chill of the London morning. So comfortable was he in his newly contented existence that his reluctance to stir stood in stark contrast to Rose, who always attempted eagerly to begin her day, tugging at his arm and imploring with a laugh, "Bennet! We can't stay here all afternoon!"

But for the power of those beloved blue eyes to beseech him to do anything she asked, he knew he could give up work and every other basic human need if he might merely linger under the covers with his beloved. Indeed, on most Sundays of their married life, Bennet could convince Rose to stay with him and whisper and doze and make love until the morning bled into the afternoon and she finally convinced him to leave the flat. ("I need fresh air! _We_ need fresh air! It can't be healthy to stay in all day.")

With the work of a policeman never done – much less the work of the chief inspector of the busy Leman Street station house – there were, of course, more than a few mornings (and late nights and Sundays) interrupted by Constable Grace or another bobby beating the door and requesting the Inspector come at once. But unlike the frenzied days of the Ripper murders and the nights when a chair propped into a corner served for a quick doze, he never lingered longer than necessary when called from Rose's side. In the dark of the morning or the hazy gray of pre-dawn, he slipped into the flat as though he'd never gone and, no matter the hour, Rose would come halfway to consciousness for a kiss hello and then fold herself softly into him, wrapping her warm body around his chilled limbs and allowing a contented sigh to escape as sleep claimed her once more.

There were no more nightmares of the desert for the Bennet Drake who slept with Rose by his side, no more terrors that dared disturb his rest, for her sheer presence would not allow them to come close. And for a man who had spent so much of his life battling demons in one form or another, the notion that he could rest – truly _rest_ – in the arms of the woman who claimed his heart as her own on the first day he ever saw her, was foreign, unexpected, and welcome. It was a desperate wish fulfilled, and so he cherished every second and never once took them – or her - for granted.

Gratitude did not, however, prevent him from pulling the covers back over his head on the occasional early morning and pretending that he had nowhere else to be – a scheme that typically only worked until Rose's laugh raised him from his repose once more.

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

" **No human being believes that any other human being has a right to be in bed when he himself is up." Robert Lynd**

She always hated to get out of bed on early mornings.

Even in childhood when she knew that the cupboards held but crumbs and that her mother would be gone to toil in the factory long before the sun cracked the rim of the horizon, Rose Erskine knew that to get out of bed in the morning was to be obligated to face the harsh realities of the world. Conversely, to remain buried beneath the covers for but a few more blissful moments was to keep them at bay.

There were fine ladies in big houses, she knew, who breakfasted in bed and who rose only if they chose to, not because they needed to go out and scrounge for food or income or all of the things that made the act of survival possible for those in the rookery. Such fine ladies had choices in their lives – they could decide when to climb out of bed, when and what they would eat for breakfast, lunch, tea, and supper, what color dress they would put on that day, and how they would while away their hours. Rose knew this because she saw them – passed them on the street or peered at them around corners – when she made her pilgrimage to the Ragged School for her regular reading lessons. She - who struggled over the cobblestones and did her best to avoid the horse muck in her path –regularly passed by those who were helped from carriages and never had to contemplate what the refuse might do to their delicate shoes.

Hiding in bed in the mornings was ever favorable to horse muck to young Rose, of course, but her mother was determined that the one difference between those fine ladies and her daughter that would _not_ exist would be in education. Each of those women could read, her mother knew, and it was she who insisted on helping Rose pay for teaching that would hopefully keep her from the factories and also from the brothels. A girl from the rookery who could read had a better chance of gaining the sort of employment that wouldn't kill or maim her or work her to death before she was twenty-five. Young Rose Erskine was to be that girl and so to Field Lane she was sent.

She was grateful to her mother later, as Rose concluded that the literacy she acquired on her journey went beyond mere books, as she made a point to observe the beautifully attired women she passed on the street and made mental notes about those who featured prominently in the stories she read. Such were the women she aspired to become, for they glowed with health and seemed not to have a single care that might mar their unlined faces - faces unlike that of her own mother who was a strong woman and a good one, but also who long ago forfeited herself to labor and poverty, two diseases from which she would never recover.

That her mother could one day find a life of ease was a dream of young Rose that was dashed dramatically by the arrival of a loutish stepfather who ran cons on the streets of Whitechapel and leered at Rose in increasingly dangerous fashion the longer she lingered under her mother's roof. And when her mother died and the cost of the funeral took every last penny they had and then some, Rose decided to take her chances with the streets rather than the man who harm her sooner rather than later.

Without any employable skills beyond reading, however, and still in possession of the dream she and her mother had shared for her to have a better life (the only legacy left to her), Rose was bereft. She could go to the factory that had taken her mother's youth and (ultimately) her life or enter a life of service – such a choice would certainly put a roof over her head and food on her plate for a lifetime. But either choice was to sell herself – her body, her mind, and worst of all her dream – for the sake of bread, a lifetime of exhaustion, and perhaps a few coins she would never have time to spend.

No one would own Rose Erskine, she decided. She would be responsible for her own fate. So what if she had to sell part of herself for a while to survive?

So what if she knew her mother would have died anew had she learned that her daughter fed herself by trading on her beauty rather than the brain that cost so much to cultivate?

Rose sold her body so that she might keep her mind – a small price to pay, she concluded, for the hope that one day she could secure her adolescent dream. Was it hubris to believe that she might rise above the station of a Whitechapel prostitute one day? Perhaps – but it was certainly no more audacious than the dream she forged on childhood mornings when she resented having to rise instead of pretending she was a great lady in a fine house who might lie in bed for a while longer. And if it preserved her spirit to spend but a few agonizing moments dwelling in that fantasy when her body had been sold to another for his own purposes, was it not worth it?

Later, when she took residency at Tenter Street, the ability to rise in the late morning became an unexpected luxury. Miss Susan ran a house with strict rules where the men were rarely – if ever – allowed to stay overnight and, unlike some of the lowbrow cat houses where other girls toiled on their backs for coin at all hours of the day and night, Miss Susan's girls were allowed the morning hours to rest. In fact, so prideful was she of the beauty and skill of her girls, she took care to mandate that the morning hours were to be quiet and still in her entire house – which allowed Rose the chance to sleep past dawn every single day. In fact, at Miss Susan's she rarely rose before 9:00 or 10:00 without good reason and when she finally did climb from her feather-filled mattress, it was (as always) with the greatest of reluctance.

Still, in many ways, Tenter Street was no different than the home of Rose's childhood. Though there was always breakfast to be had at Miss Susan's and a comfortable house that kept the evils of the streets at bay, to rise each morning was still to relinquish her dream of a better life and accept cold reality once more. In her bed, alone and unmolested while the house remained hushed around her, it was easy to imagine that she wasn't a prostitute, that she owned both her mind _and_ her body. The fantasy could breathe and Rose could pretend that she wasn't about to endure another day of groping hands and foul wheezing on her neck from some uptown toff who saw her as a plaything and not a person.

That the life of a prostitute was fraught with danger was not revelatory to Rose either – not in the wake of the Ripper murders, nor in the wake of her own near-death experiences with the vile Arthur Donaldson and vicious Victor Trumper. But on the day the haven of Tenter Street was invaded by a mob of angry American Pinkertons and she escaped by the barest of margins to the flat of Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake, her once and ever savior, she realized that she would have to reclaim her body for her own if she were to put her dreams back on their track.

"You must be brave," the sergeant told her as he sent her on her way and she wanted to protest that she didn't know how, that she'd always relied on her fantasies to guide her and they didn't come with a map.

But a smart, literate woman who had survived for so long in a profession that claimed lives but did not make them was not without wiles. Rose made her way to the back of the chorus line at Blewett's and toiled her way to the top of the bill on hard work, not on her back as she once feared she might have to. And while late nights and exhausting days of rehearsal turned many a girl to drink and other vices in an effort to manage the stress, Rose relied on rising late to keep her dreams alive. If she could but rise in her own time, she could find the strength to press on for another day, another performance, another audience.

Yet no one was more surprised than she to learn that, even after she toured greater England under the heading "Queen of the Costers," even after the ranks of her fans swelled to hundreds, then thousands, and even after she secured her place among the ranks of the respectable by agreeing to marry Edgar Morton, she still felt no more impetus to rise from her bed in the morning and begin her day than she previously had. Moreover, instead of feeling as she had always imagined that the fine ladies she idolized in childhood did – free to get up or remain reclined, completely at their own leisure – she instead felt less and less inclined to begin her day. It seemed that the louder the applause became, the quieter and more oppressive the silence of the mornings that followed was.

No longer did she dodge horse muck on the streets, of course. No longer did she scramble for meals or her livelihood. No longer did she sell her body to those who would desecrate it – yet far from feeling a sense of accomplishment, she merely sensed something missing.

To discover the identify of that very something in the dim glow of the morning sunrise was therefore wholly unexpected – in particular because Rose could not recall a single morning when she had ever awakened before the sun. Always she opened her eyes to see it glaring down upon her as though in judgment; never had she glimpsed it peeking cheekily over the horizon.

Never had her heart surged to meet it before.

Though her instinct was to leap up to greet the day, she quickly realized that her body was rendered immobile by the limbs of another. They were so completely entangled that she could not discern how she might extricate even an arm, but as memory of the night previous returned, she realized that, though she wished to rise and send a shout of happiness over the rooftops outside, she should not, lest she disturb the sleeping form of one Bennet Drake.

On every single morning of her past, Rose awoke with a dream for a better, easier life than the one she was born to. But when she found what she thought was the answer, she discovered that it was only a patch to provide a temporary fix; it wasn't a solution. Only as the shadow of the sun illuminated the lines etched onto the face of her beloved did she realize that no more gaps existed in her life for he filled them all.

In fact, Bennet Drake made her fears obsolete; he always had. On the day they met, he told her she would live and she did. On the day the Pinkertons attacked, he told her to be brave and she was. And when he told her that he wanted nothing more than for her to find happiness, she looked into its eyes, leaned forward, and seized it by kissing him full on the mouth.

On that first morning, then - and every shared morning after - Rose Erskine discovered that, no matter how late the hours she kept at the theatre, she always awakened with an eagerness to go out and face the world when the sun rose. She yearned to experience the day she would share with Bennet. In fact, after she broke with Edgar and a judge pronounced Bennet and Rose united until death, she found that her favorite time of day became the gray hours of morning when she would open her eyes in the dim light, roll over, and kiss her husband until he came reluctantly to full consciousness.

"Bennet, it's time to get up," she'd say - usually only to receive a muffled response that was more grumble than conversation and find herself pulled deeper into his embrace. (Reluctant to rise was Inspector Drake.)

"Come on, you've got work," she'd admonish, poking a finger into his chest to prove that he merely feigned sleep.

Sundays were the exception to her up early rule, for Sundays were theirs and theirs alone. And though Rose loved nothing more than strolling alongside Bennet through the streets and markets, she never pushed him to leave the flat until the afternoon sun had shifted overhead and they'd spent the morning relaxing in each other's embrace. It was the compromise she made for the other mornings when she gently shoved him from between the sheets so that he would be on time to take his post at Leman Street.

But on weekdays and Saturdays, always she awakened with excitement and enthusiasm for the day – for her life – and anxious to share it with the man whose arm always attempted to pull her back inside their warm and cozy cocoon for but a few moments more.

FIN


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